Monday, June 1, 2015

Yay for Ireland! Here
in the US, there’s a tendency to sentimentalize and stereotype Ireland as the
old country, the land of leprechauns.
Now it’s shown to be a vital, courageous, cutting-edge place, with a
more inclusive social awareness than we have here in the U.S.

In the US, we are getting
there. I’m not going to complain about
the progress we’ve made. As a lesbian, I
feel safer and more included every day.
I recently received an official document referring to Marisol as my
spouse, and I read it over and over, and took a picture of it. All the language in the document was purely
formal, even robotic, yet it warmed my heart so much.

Gay rights are good for everyone, but
especially for women, since they allow us to exist outside rigidly defined
gender roles. We – both gay and straight
women - have fought for centuries for the right to say who we are. And for at least the last fifty years, lesbians
have been the forefront of the feminist struggle, although not always welcomed
in that position.

This spring and summer I’m going to
three all-women events. I’ve already
been to the first, a lesbian writers’ conference in Georgia and in June, I’ll
go to a womyn’s spirituality conference in Pennsylvania In August, I’ll attend (very sadly) the final
gathering of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

So I’m getting a good dose of women’s
energy – also spelled womyn’s energy or womon energy in our community – and discovering
some interesting things. One of the
things I’m finding is that, as mainstream society finds more ways to include and
accept us, many women are bowing out of the traditional categories. They’re breaking it down, smudging, dissecting,
experimenting, testing, redefining, rewording.

After the conference, I found myself
sitting in a room with three women who I would’ve called lesbians, but only one
of them actually defined herself that way.
The others had chosen alternate genders and more inclusive sexual
definitions. This doesn’t mean that if a
man had walked into the room, he’d have had a chance in Hell with these two. He probably would’ve seen all the piercings,
turned pale, and left. But who
knows? They weren’t actually ruling it
out. They weren’t ruling anything
out.

Maybe it’s a social law, that every
border must break down, and every wall must fall. Or maybe it’s happening more these days, with
Neptune going through the amorphous, ambiguous sign Pisces, and the sun, Mercury
and Mars all in the multi-faceted sign Gemini.

And tomorrow there’s a full moon in
mutable signs. This is like a crystal
breaking down the light and sending it in a thousand directions. There is no certainty with this full moon,
but there is lots of movement and much communication. I feel sorry for people who make their living
espousing absolute dogmas, especially during the next couple of weeks. Only those with quicksilver minds will be heard.

Feminist lesbians – now considered a
venerable elder population by many younger and genderqueer women – do have some
insecurities around all these shifting definitions. We’ve worked hard to own the word “lesbian”,
and to honor everything womanly. Believe
me, this has taken some work in this androcentric world we all still live
in. And it’s not like the work is done. Women are still endangered, belittled, and
condescended to, even here in the US.
And there are many countries in which our situation is much more
critical.

Transgender people have done some
good work in getting the message out about male privilege, since they’ve
experienced treatment as both genders. But
there’s also been a pitched battle between some transgender activists and the
longstanding traditions of some lesbian communities. There are many women who are not ready for
the splintering of our self-definitions, especially imposed from the
outside.

There is a lot of grief in womyn’s
community around the ending of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival. For forty years, Michfest has been a
week-long protected space for thousands of women, but it’s been attacked quite
virulently by trans activists who feel that it does not honor their experience.
Still, that leaves a lot of women who’ve
found a safer home there than anywhere else in the world. I’ll
be going to give a workshop on astrology this year, and I know I’ll be
encountering a lot of tears, everywhere I go.

But that’s in August. In June, I’ll be going to a goddess festival,
and most of the women around me will be lesbians, feminists and/or pagans, with
a hunger for a womanly image of the divine. And that’s what I’ll be looking for too. I want to find my inner strength and wisdom right
there alongside my femaleness. I want to
combine these things, fractured early on by the world in which I live.

The shape-shifting properties of June
will continue strong until the summer solstice.
At that point, a fiery Jupiter/Uranus trine gathers all the energy up
and looks for some exciting ways to express it.
Whatever happens around the solstice has great potential for creative
change. We may see heroes, villains,
clowns and avatars, all a little larger than life.

As June comes to an end, there will
be many large gestures – extravaganzas, festivals, performances, celebrations,
fireworks - as Venus and Jupiter come
together in the exuberant sign Leo. There’s also a lot of emotional energy, with
the sun and Mars together in the family-oriented sign Cancer. This lends itself to reunions, block parties,
and other ways to give energy to the places and people who have nurtured
us.

So June ends on a high note, but the
questions remain. There are no pat
answers, just fragments of old definitions, and jagged points of difference. These need to be worn down with use, like chips
exchanged in a poker game. The play goes
on, and it will happen over time. And
then the next set of definitions will be broken down in their turn, and then
the next.